Definition
Synthetic monitoring uses scripted, scheduled requests — generated by a monitoring system rather than real users — to test whether a service is available and performing well. Uptime checks, HTTP checks, and API checks are all forms of synthetic monitoring.
It's "synthetic" because the traffic is artificial and predictable, running around the clock from outside your infrastructure. This lets you detect problems even when no real users happen to be hitting the affected path.
Why It Matters
Synthetic monitoring catches issues proactively, 24/7, without waiting for a real user to stumble into them. It works at 3 AM when traffic is low, tests specific critical paths reliably, and gives you a consistent baseline for availability and performance. It's the foundation of knowing your service works before customers tell you it doesn't.
How It Works
You define what to check (a URL, method, expected response) and how often. The monitoring service runs those synthetic requests on schedule from external locations, records the results, and alerts on failures. Because the checks are consistent and repeatable, they produce clean uptime and response-time data over time.
Real-World Example
A team sets synthetic checks on their login, checkout, and API endpoints every minute. At 4 AM — with almost no real traffic — checkout starts returning errors after a deploy. The synthetic check catches it immediately and alerts on-call, long before the morning traffic rush would have exposed it.
Best Practices
- Run synthetic checks on critical user paths, not just the homepage
- Check frequently enough to catch short, low-traffic outages
- Use synthetic monitoring as your consistent availability baseline
- Combine it with real-user data where you have it
- Keep checks lightweight so they don't strain the service
Common Mistakes
- Only relying on real-user reports instead of proactive checks
- Monitoring trivial pages while critical flows go unchecked
- Checking too infrequently to catch low-traffic outages
- Designing heavy synthetic checks that load the system
- Treating synthetic results as identical to real-user experience in every case
In Monitoristic
Monitoristic is a synthetic monitoring tool — it runs scheduled HTTP checks from outside your infrastructure to simulate a client reaching your service, around the clock, so problems surface before your users find them.